


the world is brighter for having known you

by 8The_Great_Perhaps8



Category: Naruto
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Stream of Consciousness, Tenten (Naruto)-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 10:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19061203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8The_Great_Perhaps8/pseuds/8The_Great_Perhaps8
Summary: Tenten wants to be somebody. Somebody important. Somebody known.





	the world is brighter for having known you

**Author's Note:**

> listen somebody has to care about tenten and it might as well be me

Tenten isn’t really  _ known. _

Not, like, nobody at all knows her, but she’s not  _ known, _ not like Gai-sensei and Neji and even Lee, because people  _ say  _ things when they hear Gai-sensei’s and Neji’s and Lee’s names. Like, with Gai-sensei, they call him "that crazy man" or "that guy, who knows how he got to be jounin"; and with Neji they call him "that poor boy" or "the Hyuuga genius”; and with Lee they call him “mini-Gai” or “caterpillar eyebrows”.

When people hear Tenten’s name, they say “Who’s that girl?”

Not like, “Who’s  _ that  _ girl?” like, who out of all those other girls is she, who’s the girl who’s so different from all the other girls, who’s that particular girl who stands out so much that you have to ask about her specifically. And not like, “Who’s that  _ girl?” _ like, who’s that particular person who happens to be a girl, or like the way people in romance novels and adventure books say when they finally spot the amazing heroine, with all those tones of wonder in their voice, like,  _ wow, _ that  _ girl, _ who stands out so much and everyone knows.

They say it like,  _ “Who’s  _ that girl?” like, you might have heard her name once but you can’t place the face, or like you didn’t quite hear her name in the first place, or like you don’t even remember who she was after you were talking to her for twenty minutes, or like you can’t quite understand why she’s talking to you at all.

Tenten knows that she doesn’t deserve that. She deserves a, “Who’s  _ that  _ girl?” or a “Who’s that  _ girl?”  _ or even just a, “Who’s  _ that?”.  _ She’s better than some forgettable girl, one of those background girls in manga where the author didn’t even bother to draw in the face, better than those ghost stories about girls called A-chan or B-san. She’s somebody, and not just somebody but  _ somebody. _

Because the thing is, Tenten is good. Like,  _ really  _ good, like top kunoichi good, like top rookie good, good like making all her classmates jealous good. Like, if she were clan, people would call her a  _ prodigy _ good. She’s been good since before she was in the academy, pinching off a little bit of chakra and pushing it into a cut-up storybook to hide sweets in in the orphanage good. And, sure, she already knew that she would be going to the academy to become a shinobi- orphans owe twelve years of service to Konoha, less if they get adopted before making genin, and flunking out of the academy would just mean that Tenten would have to be a cook or a test subject or a non-shinobi spy or something.- but it would have been nice for other people to know how good Tenten was. Like, she could be one of the kids that grown-ups talk about, about them being trained too early.

But that kind of gossip always just follows up with “Clans take training too seriously”, like what people sometimes say about Neji, and Tenten isn’t clan.

Tenten isn’t even sure  _ what  _ she is. She was a battlefield baby, found after some battle that nobody remembers who was fighting. She might be a Kumo baby, like Kabuto apparently was. Kabuto and Tenten don’t look anything alike, though, Kabuto with his light hair and his skinny face while Tenten has hair nearly as dark as Neji’s and baby fat still clinging to her cheeks.

Some chuunin that had done all her D-rank missions at the orphanage used to tell them stories about Kumo. Her name had been Yui, and she had made the kids call her Yui-nee and she had used -tan for everyone except Tenten. She had told them stories about the wicked Kumo nin, who cared so little for their own children that they would go to battle with their own children on their backs so that their children would die alongside them.

The Kumo stories really only started when Tenten was five or six, or ish and thereabouts, though, and it hadn’t seemed unusual until years later when Neji told her and Lee the story of the wicked Kumo nin that had killed his father.

Tenten isn’t even sure if she’s blood from outside of Konoha. She should be, though, because if she isn’t- if she is Konoha-born, more chlorophyll in her blood than hemoglobin, a fire in her eye instead of a spark and an explosion in her heart instead of a flame- if she isn’t blood from outside of Konoha, then that means that she’s no one. Not only no one, but that there’s no one in Konoha at all who cares about her, no family left alive, not even distant cousins who would take in a battlefield baby. It means she really is the only person in her family, a one-person cell already doomed to fail, and it means that no one in her entirely dead family felt enough for her dead family to take in their orphaned baby daughter. Unless anyone who would is dead, too, and Tenten really doesn’t have any allies left.

So it’s easier for her to decide that she’s not Konoha blood. She daydreamed about being Kumo for a little bit, until the wicked Kumo stories started, and then she daydreamed about being Iwa blood, wrung from stone, or Suna blood, blown to Konoha on a windstorm, or even Tetsu blood, stalwart and true and  _ pushed  _ to Konoha.

But she looks in her mirror, and looks in the library’s copy of the bingo book, and compares hitai-ates from Iwa and Suna against her forehead, and even wonders what she would look like with that samurai armor from Tetsu, but none of it fits right the way the Konoha hitai-ate does.

Tenten had, at one time, wanted to become the next Senju Tsunade. Like all the other little girls in the orphanage, she wanted to be the Slug Princess, a healing kunoichi with super strength and superb chakra control. She had wanted to follow in her footsteps, another in a long line of other orphaned kunoichi who wanted to be like the only female Sannin.

Kabuto had laughed and called her silly, told her that her fate would be better spent following in the footsteps of the Toad Sage, or even Mitarashi Anko, who wasn’t a Sannin and didn’t have a special moniker or anything.

And Tenten had been upset with him, for a bit, but she knew that he was right. She had been half-relieved when the caretaker, old Mariko-baa, had told all the girls that there would be no apprenticeships at the hospital until they had at least been genin a month. Tenten had complained and whined with all the other girls, because it’s never a good idea to be separated out when you’re already an orphan, like poor Naruto-kun, but she had taken a deep sigh of relief, anyways, knowing that she wouldn’t have to work at the hospital.

Kabuto was one of the only other orphans that Tenten could talk to honestly, and the very only older person that she talked to honestly. He was up late when she was, and would come and get her from the dormitories when she was restless, somehow always knowing, and would take her down to the sitting room and shove one of his class scrolls at her while he dug through his texts from his apprenticeship. Tenten probably learned more from those scattered few late nights with Kabuto rustling his own papers next to her.

One time, when Tenten was chatting with Neji and Lee and brought up everything she had learned from Kabuto, Neji sneered..

“That fool?” He asked. “He’s taken the chuunin exams six times, and has failed every single time. I’d be surprised if he taught you how to tie your shoes.”

“Neji,” Tenten said, trying to be patient, “shut the fuck up or I’ll seal your tongue in a scroll.”

Tenten likes her teammates, she really does, but they’re both such morons. Morons in completely opposite ways, which isn’t as much fun as it should be.

Tenten can confidently describe Neji as a dolt, and she’s decided that a dolt is a particular kind of moron who’s a moron and a dick about it. Because Neji can be kind of a dick, sometimes, when he gets too dark or too sad or too angry or too obsessed with fate. But Tenten can make cootie catchers, and they always come out with Neji having a long and happy life where he becomes a celebrity, no matter how Tenten changes the options. But Neji is also a moron, because he still hasn’t realized that Tenten and Lee and Gai-sensei actually do like him, a lot, and that some people are nice, in spite of how un-nice the world is.

Lee is also a moron, but not a dolt. Dolts are always kind of dicks, and Lee has never been a dick in all the time that Tenten’s known him. He’s a dunce, which is a particular kind of moron who’s a moron, doesn’t  _ realize  _ he’s a moron, and doesn’t realize that other people have emotions. It’s a good thing that Lee’s a dunce instead of a dolt, because if he was a dolt then he and Neji would get into a lot of fights. Neji’s only ever outright said that Lee’s dream of being a splendid shinobi was stupid once, which is pretty good for Neji. The point is, though, that Lee usually doesn’t realize that Neji’s calling Lee stupid, or saying that Lee’s a failure of a shinobi. Which is good for everyone, because if Lee  _ did  _ realize what a dolt Neji is, then they would constantly be getting into fistfights.

And even though Neji’s a dolt sometimes, and oftentimes a dick, he’s still a pretty good friend. He’s pulled Tenten and Lee out of scrapes more times than any of them can count, and he doesn’t bother holding it over their heads like you would think he would, because he’s kind of a dick. Neji’s honest and trustworthy and stoic and brave and he actually does believe in Lee and Tenten, no matter how much of a dick he is about it.

And Neji’s  _ funny, _ too, which Tenten really hadn’t expected, because Neji had been boring as all hell in the academy. But once he got to know Tenten and Lee better than  _ who’s- _ that-girl and too-loud-taijutsu, he actually started telling jokes, like funny jokes that get Tenten and Lee rolling around on the ground laughing. And Neji laughs, too, when he’s managed to take the world off his shoulders for a few minutes and rest. Like when they had had that mission in Iwa for a few weeks, and they had been sitting at some ramen shop drinking sodas while they waited, and Lee had started standing on his head and drinking his soda upside-down while he sang “The Old Shinobi Told Me”, and Neji had laughed so hard that purple fizz had started coming out of his nose, and then when they had gotten their ramen and Lee had started eating  _ that  _ upside down, Neji had laughed so hard that a ramen noodle had come out of his nose, which had made all three of them completely useless as shinobi for the rest of the afternoon.

Lee is really funny, and half the time it’s completely unintentional. Because his speeches about being a splendid shinobi really  _ are  _ hilarious, no matter how sincerely he believes in them, because everything becomes hilarious when the person who is doing it is doing it all upside down, and Lee is frequently upside down for no good reason. His hair must have some sort of amazing scientific properties, unless he’s using his chakra, because it never really wavers from his weird waxed down bowl cut.

Lee has gotten a  _ lot  _ weirder since the academy, and it isn’t just because Tenten knows him better, like with Neji who won’t eat squash or pears and says he’s allergic to both. Lee was average in the academy, trying his hardest, only really standing out for his eyebrows and for being an easy target for bullying. But now he stands out for absolutely everything, because he screams at the top of his lungs and does push-ups on the walls of buildings in Konoha for no good reason and just starts standing upside down at random intervals. He’s got passion, that’s what he’s got, passion and self-confidence.

Lee is definitely the brashest out of all of them, always yelling and screaming and shrieking. He’s also the worst at sneaking in and being stealthy and most of the typical shinobi arts. Lee sucks at most things, actually.

Great friend, though. The kind of friend you could find at two AM and you could punch the shit out of each other when you’re too pissed and too angry. Tenten’s done that, a couple of times, and Lee’s great about it. Even goes to the 24-hour convenience store and buys ice cream for Tenten afterwards. Lee really is a phenomenal friend.

He’s not a nighttime friend, though. When Tenten needs him at night, he looks way too out of place under the stars, only looks half-right in the cool fluorescent glow of the convenience store. He’s at his best at high noon, or in the bright summer mornings. When he can be loud and kind and protective without needing to hide his voice from the people sleeping.

Neji is a nighttime friend, though he doesn’t quite know it yet. Tenten’s rarely had the chance to get to Neji at night, with the Hyuuga compound and its guards and being way too stuck-up about letting civilian orphans in at night, even when they  _ say  _ that they’re just visiting their genin teammate and want to go over some of the forms from the new katas that Gai taught that day, because who knows what Gai was thinking or even  _ doing,  _ with how loud and exuberant he is, but  _ nooooo,  _ the Hyuuga guards can’t let  _ anyone  _ in the compound once the gate is closed, of  _ course _ not, and Tenten absolutely does her impression of the guards for Neji the next morning when he’s still half asleep and a third coffee.

It’s only happened a couple times that Tenten’s gotten to speak with him at night. Mostly out-of-village missions, long escorts or even just gathering materials for the hospital (and why they don’t send the new Ino-Shika-Cho is a question that no one can answer). When they go camping, set up four watches throughout the night with the campfire blazing, and Tenten gets that itch in her chest that tells her that there’s at least two more hours until she passes out, even though she already took her watch.

So she leaves the tent, and Neji’s on watch, and he just stares at her while she works out her next storage scroll, shoving in handaxe after handaxe after handaxe, as many dull weapons as she’s managed to snatch from the blacksmith’s salvage heap.

Tenten chats while she does that. She can’t help it, she’s never really been good at sitting still and keeping quiet when her life isn’t at risk. So she talks, rambles, asks nothing responses that Neji mutters into the darkness.

“I’m gonna  _ be  _ somebody, someday, y’know,” she chatters, filling the quiet Fire night and defeating the purpose of Neji being awake to listen for dangers. “And not just somebody, but  _ somebody, _ y’know? The kind of person everyone knows. Like, a hokage, my face up on a mountain. Not a hokage, though, I’d hate that. I wanna be- like the Yellow Flash, y’know, or the White Fang of Konoha. A fighter. Someone that everyone knows. Someone  _ important, _ someone in the history books, like the kind of person that they teach you about in those history classes at the academy, y’know?  _ Famous,  _ famous for being such a superb shinobi. For being a fuuinjutsu prodigy. ‘Cause I am a prodigy, y’know, like you, but since I do fuuinjutsu and I’m a civilian orphan who nobody even knows if I’m from Konoha, no one gives a shit, y’know? Maybe I’m Uzushio blood. I know they’re supposed to be all blended in with Konoha now, three generations down through when the island disappeared, but I  _ feel  _ Uzushio. Really, really! I’m really good at sealing, and that’s what Uzushio was supposed to be known for. I’d like to be known for something, someday, like I said. But, y’know, it’s-”

“You will be,” Neji interrupts, loud enough to get Tenten to stop talking for once.

“Huh?” Tenten asks, her brush not stopping as she draws in the last of the seals.

“Someone,” Neji clarifies. “You’re going to be someone. You can’t fight against fate.”

Tenten snickers, and keeps drawing. “That’s the meanest way you could have said that you believed in me.”

“ _ I _ don’t matter,” Neji says. “I’m not going to end up being anything important. You, though- you’ve got none of the obstacles Lee or I have. You have chakra, and you can manipulate it, and you’ve got no one hobbling you.”

“You’re a good friend, Neji,” Tenten says. “Even if you are kind of a dick.”

“Everything in life is hard.  _ Somebody’s  _ gotta be a dick.”

Like that, Neji’s funny. Funnier than you expect when you first see him, not funny like the way all Gai’s annoying jounin coworkers call things funny, but funny in a  _ real  _ way, like he tells jokes that have actual punchlines, not just inane statements about councils and how administrators suck.

Lee and Neji are both phenomenal friends, really, the first real ones after Kabuto that Tenten’s actually had. Both of them believe in her, Neji quietly when the moon is high and the stars are shining, and Lee at the top of his lungs when the sun is at the top of the sky and the sun is free from clouds.

Tenten’s never had someone who’s heard her say that she’s going to be someone actually believe her.

Because Neji and Lee make Tenten feel like she’s already known. Gai spends too much of his time training Lee (who actually does have real parents, despite what appearances would lead you to believe) and trying to talk Neji through feeling an emotion to have much time for Tenten, but she’s okay with that. She’s always been self-taught, more of a “silently reading scrolls way past her bedtime” kind of learner than a “supervised by a jounin who really only speaks in bold and incomprehensible metaphors” kind of learner.

But Neji and Lee both believe in Tenten so much, call her the secret weapon because of all the weapons she’s got hidden in her scrolls, say that she’s gonna be the most famous out of all of them, surpass Tsunade herself. Lee’s going to be famous too, obviously, because he’s a splendid shinobi, and he insists that Neji is going to be famous, while Neji insists that if he’s famous for anything besides being a pirate, he’ll buy a hat and eat it just for the occasion.

Privately, Tenten is pretty sure that Neji is going to be famous for bringing revolution. He’s already got Lee and Tenten backing him if he ever does decide that destiny and fate is a load of baloney and goes to fight his uncle. Lee’s offered, multiple times, to challenge Hiashi in the town square, or break into one of the clan heads’ meetings to fight him there. And Tenten’s offered, a few dozen times, to pour as much glitter as she can fit into Hiashi’s room, belongings, sealed away weaponry, clothing, blankets, laundry, and whatever other open spaces there are that could have glitter instead of nothing.

Neji, for some reason that is only known to him, has refused both of them, every time they offer.

It’s the chuunin exams that get her, really.

Because Tenten really isn’t good at exams, paper-and-pencil and fill in the little circle, if you please, thank you kindly. And she didn’t realize that they were supposed to cheat until Neji sent the mirror over to her so that they could help Lee, but it’s not like being a fuuinjutsu prodigy would help any. Maybe if she did badly enough that she sealed away the graphite from her pencil- but they’d just think that she hadn’t taken the test.

Doesn’t matter. Team Gai passes.

The forest is better in some ways, because Tenten hates classrooms with a deep, burning passion, but worse in others, because seeing a mysterious scroll coated with seals and chakra is a mystery begging to be solved, and it’s damn hard to not bust out her brushes and ink within twenty seconds of the creepy jounin passing the scroll to Neji.

But the game is easy, even watching Neji beat the shit out of four Oto genin while the rookies are crying in the background, even when the creepy Uchiha almost pops the arms out of the sockets of one of the Oto genin.

Within two days of being in the forest, they’re in the tower in the center and Gai is hugging them like they’re stuffed animals, professing his pride in his genin.

All that pride is gone in the preliminaries.

Tenten should’ve won. She  _ should’ve  _ won, because people were actually asking “Who’s  _ that _ girl?” and not  _ “Who’s  _ that girl?”, staring at her and her cocky confidence and how proud she is, and then the kunoichi from Suna comes down, with ten times the confidence and bravado of anything Tenten could say, without saying a single thing.

Even when the Suna kunoichi pulls out a giant fan, the kind of fan that Suna nin used during every shinobi world war since shinobi managed to settle in Suna and live long enough to learn to fight there.

The kind of fan that knock down no-name no-clan no-life orphans.

Because even with the fan, Tenten’s always making plans. Plans on plans on plans on plans, half formed half baked and half stupid on their mother’s side, and she was already thinking  _ ink brush seal vanish the fan into your scroll, _ but her first plan was to throw every weapon she had out at the kunoichi, every senbon and handaxe and hand-sharpened kunai that came out of the scrap heap at the blacksmith’s, which Tenten didn’t technically have permission to take. She throws them all out, and it’s convenient now, because her scrolls empty, but she must have underestimated the size of the Suna Kunoichi’s fan, because one sweep of it blows Tenten away, even as she was planning  _ what seals what order not a spiral there but a line, curve the sun around the wind character and there, the fan won’t come back out _ and  _ use the red ink, sure the black conducts chakra better but it’s the red that gets the spirit of the wind hidden away _ and while she’s thinking about chakra theory and the fuuinjutsu theory and numbers and facts and cross-checking that’s always echoing and thudding around Tenten’s brain, the Suna kunoichi destroys Tenten utterly and completely.

When she gets back to the observation platform, Lee grabs her in a hug tight enough to break ribs and Neji just pats her on the shoulder and Gai is busy talking to his gray-haired friend.

“You should have won,” Neji tells her.

“I’m so fucking  _ stupid,” _ Tenten says, her voice still muffled in Lee’s shoulder. “I knew what I had to do. I just  _ couldn’t.” _

“Tenten, you are a  _ splendid _ shinobi,” Lee says. “And had you been matched up against any other shinobi here, you would have won so handily that they would have awarded you jounin as soon as the bout was over.”

“I knew how to seal her stupid fan,” Tenten says. “I knew  _ how.” _

“You’re being ridiculous,” Neji says, because he doesn’t know how to be nice, really, didn’t hear enough kids’ stories when he was little. “You know that you’ll be jounin before any of us. And that you’ll  _ be  _ somebody, too.”

“Not just somebody,” Lee agrees.  _ “Somebody.” _

Tenten sniffles. She shoves Lee away, still sniffling, and hobbles off to where the medic-nin are. She’s got, at the very least, a sprained ankle, wrist, and a twisted muscle in her leg.

She misses Neji’s  _ and  _ Lee’s fights, while she’s hiding in the tower and forcing her tears and her choking breaths back down her throat.

She sees Neji’s cousin come into the medical wing on a stretcher, and she suspects, and then Lee comes in on a stretcher, with the medic-nin shouting and calling for different medications and seals and chakra to shove into muscles and bones, and she runs.

She’s no Senju Tsunade.

Back where the fights are, the arena has turned into a pile of sand, where the creepy Suna kid is standing, covering one eye with his hand, while the Suna kunoichi is trying to calm him down. Neji is up on the balcony, apparently being lectured by Gai.

At the end of the day, once Gai’s left them alone for more than a second, Neji says they could start a band. He suggests the name “Two Failures and a Psycho”.

Tenten suggests he shut the hell up, while she signs Lee’s cast with glitter glue.

It’s almost right back to normal. Tenten is  _ “Who’s  _ that girl?” still, but now it’s Lee who’s “that poor boy” and Neji who’s “that crazy kid”. Neji and Lee have managed to switch, somehow, develop and renew and become something wholly different for each of them, while Tenten is still completely forgettable, and almost completely forgotten.

In the month between losing the fight that she should have won and the actual chunin exams for the ones who aren’t losers, when Tenten isn’t chucking dull kunai at Neji’s blind spot or visiting Lee in the hospital, Gai marches her up to the blacksmith that she usually steals her scrap from and demands that she get an apprenticeship.

Tenten is fully expecting a “What,  _ this  _ girl? Who’s she supposed to be?” at best, and a call to what few police are left at worst, the blacksmith finally sick and tired of her stealing everything from him, and for Gai to have to watch in shame while she gets carted off to prison and probably she dies there, too, unless Neji stops being a dick and uses his Hyuuga name to bust her out (unlikely).

But instead, the blacksmith stares down her and Gai both, not-scrawny arms folded across his not-insignificantly-muscled chest, and he bursts out laughing, fully, belly-shaking laughs that rival Gai’s for drama and volume, and he claps Tenten’s shoulder with his hand and says, “What took you so long to get up the nerve to finally talk to me, huh?”

Tenten blinks, still off-guard by the smell of fresh iron and burning blacksmith fires. “What’s that?”

The blacksmith grins, and throws both his hands up in the air. “What, you think I didn’t notice the scrawny little orphan girl stealing everything and my mother out of the scrap heap week after week? Whole smithy thinks you’re phenomenal, kid. Didn’t you ever wonder about why we tossed out so many perfectly good weapons?”

“No,” Tenten says, immediately. “I thought you’d be upset with me, stealing all your scrap.”

“Kid, it’s  _ scrap,” _ the smith says. “You can steal whatever you want from there. Shouldn’t have to anymore, though, if you’re serious about this apprentice thing.”

“Serious?” Tenten repeats, which is when she realizes that Gai’s gone and vanished. “Oh. Right! Making weapons, sure, love to. Never done it before, mostly just sharpened stuff and sealed it in my scrolls, y’know? Never actually  _ made _ anything, like, with fire. And anvils. And those fancy little detail picks you guys have, for forming the edge on the handaxes. Never done anything like that. Plus, I’m really not all that strong. I don’t have any of the muscles that, uh, you seem to have. But, hey, being a genin is all about learning, right?”

The smith smiles and raises an eyebrow. “Talker, huh? That’s good. Could always use more background noise back there. And, no offense, but we weren’t banking on having you be the muscle back there. You would only be dealing with detailing. Weapons with seals on them? High price toy these days, and we’ve heard good things about you.”

Tenten blinks. “About  _ me? _ Like, me, Tenten, orphaned civilian genin?”

“Don’t knock civilians, kid, everyone in here’s a civilian. And you’re the first fuuinjutsu prodigy who’s showed up in Konoha since the yondaime hokage. Smiths in Konoha tend to keep an eye out for your kind of talent, and I’m just glad you chose my scrap heap to start robbing. Gives me a headstart on getting you as an apprentice.”

Tenten blinks again. “People  _ know  _ me? Like,  _ me- _ me?”

“Don’t know what other you it would be, but at least in regards to the smiths, we do. Nuts and bolts, we’ll pay you nine thousand ryō a month, you come into work for minimum of twenty-five hours a month. Your first fifteen are gonna be training with the equipment back there- safety first- but that still contributes to your hours. You can keep one out of every five weapons you seal while on the premises, maximum of twelve a month. Equipment will be provided to you, but it’ll stay here. If you keep with us to chuunin, we’ll double your salary, bump your minimum monthly hours to fifty, and you’ll be able to keep three out of every five weapons you make, maximum of thirty a month. Deal?”

Tenten stares, mouth ajar, before she clicks her mouth shut. “Eleven thousand a month for genin, and  _ that _ gets doubled when I hit chuunin. If you think I’m keeping any less than two out of five weapons I seal every month, you’re delusional, and that takes the maximum to fifteen a month, and at chuunin it’ll be maximum forty a month.  _ And, _ I wanna have a discount on weapons bought here, at least twenty percent. Plus, an opportunity for a full-time job at jounin, not just an apprenticeship. That means with all the salary of an  _ actual  _ job, plus benefits.”

The smith’s eyebrow just raises more and more, until by the end of Tenten’s negotiations, it looks like someone is stringing it to the ceiling. “Well,” he finally says, “you drive a tough bargain, little lady, but I’ll take it.” He holds his hand across the counter, and Tenten shakes it heartily.

“You know, you could’ve gotten me at twenty thousand ryō,” the smith says, conversationally, without letting go of Tenten’s hand. “Fuuinjutsu prodigies have more pull than kages, around here.”

Tenten sours. “You could’ve told me that before we shook on it.”

“I run a business, kid.” The smith finally drops Tenten’s hand and flips up part of the countertop, so there’s a place for Tenten to walk through. “C’mon, let me show you the back.”

And the smithy is absolutely the most amazing place that Tenten has ever been ever and she would have worked there for free, absolutely, because the people there recognize her, don’t even ask who she is in a wondering tone of voice, like in those adventure novels. They recognize her on sight, like the way people recognize Tsunade or Neji or anybody important, and they laugh with her and talk to her and ask her to show the how her fuuinjutsu stuff works and call it bullshit that she didn’t beat the Suna nin, and she runs back to Team Gai’s training ground, late, coated with ash and her hands smudged with iron dust and grease that didn’t wash off with the dirty water they had to cool the weapons in the smithy, where Neji is waiting, arms crossed, one eyebrow raised, and he looks so much like the smith that Tenten bursts out laughing, collapses to the ground in a heap, and she’s just getting herself more filthy but who  _ cares, _ she has a job and people recognize her and call her a prodigy in the nothing ninja art that nobody cares about anymore.

And Neji just waits for her to be done laughing, and it probably takes a little while, because every time Tenten starts calming down she sees him standing there, looking just like the smithy but without literally any of the muscles, and she bursts out laughing again.

They don’t end up training that day, because it turns out that Tenten forgot literally all of her practice kunai at her apartment when Gai showed up at eight in the morning and shoved her out of the building and into the blacksmith’s shop.

They just go by the arena, where the chuunin exams are gonna be, and Neji buys them both ice cream because none of the stores want to let Tenten in, with how coated she is in every kind of particulate known to man or shinobi, and they just have a moment with both of the gnawing on popsicles that have probably been frozen since the first shinobi world war. It’s not a quiet oent, because Tenten never has quiet moments and anyway there’s way too much for her to tell Neji about for them to have a quiet moment, and he’s thrilled for her, objectively speaking, even manages to tell her that with a smile on his face.

She doesn’t end up telling Lee. She’s not really entirely sure why, but it’s something about seeing Lee lying in the hospital bed, hands limp and eyes half-open, all the junk food that she and Neji had been bringing since he’d been there unopened on his bedside table, and she doesn’t want to tell him such great news when he’s so not  _ him. _

The actual chuunin exams are, at best, a little rough.

Lee’s better, at least, more him, loud and excited and refusing to acknowledge his crushes or his casts, instead yelling that Neji had  _ better _ win, and Tenten finally tells him about the apprenticeship, and he’s thrilled for her, like she knew he would be, and he’s back to  _ him. _

On the other hand, Neji loses.

Not just his bout, against Naruto- who Tenten feels a little bad for cheering against, since they had been at the same orphanage and had had a lot of the same problems- but some part of him, something key to Neji, like how Lee had lost so much of himself when he had been in the hospital, staring at the nothing on the hospital wall across from him. He goes wild, uncontrolled, completely un-Neji, screaming about how he’s been wronged and how he hates the clans, hates the main house and the branch house and his cousin and his uncle and the people who did this to him.

But Naruto hits back, screams back, shouts that it wasn’t anyone’s fault, was only Neji’s fault, and he’s a stupid ugly hypocrite, too.

And Tenten’s always thought that Neji’s whole thing about how everything is fated was kind of baloney, when he wasn’t telling her about how she was fated to  _ be  _ somebody, but she would never tell him that in the middle of an arena full of people while she beat the tar out of him.

She waits for him outside the medical tent, makes an ugly face at Hiashi when the man walks in, and coincidentally stumbles and attaches a storage seal filled with ten pounds of glitter (or kunai shavings- really, who can tell the difference anymore?) on his back when he walks back out.

When she walks into the medical tent, Neji looks… different? Not lighter, really, just different, a little weird, just as funny looking as ever.

_ Different. _

“Tenten,” Neji says, and his voice doesn’t have the usual mean, bitter, full-moon-reflection anger that it usually has. “I feel… better.”

“You just got the shit beat outta you,” Tenten observes. “But, uh, it’s good you feel better!”

“Not because of the fight,” Neji says. “Hiashi and I talked. About my father, and about what happened to him.”

“Oh,” Tenten says. “Yeah, that’d make you feel better. You’ve had the whole world on your mind for so long, it’s no wonder you feel better without it. Plus, now, your head’s gonna be a lot more shapely.”

Neji blinks. “What?”

Tenten shrugs. “Well, having the whole world on your head for so long- makes your head flat. It’ll round back out, now.”

Neji blinks again, and then bursts out laughing.

Tenten may not be known by many people, by  _ important  _ people, but the few who do know her?

The people who  _ do  _ know her are more than enough.


End file.
